Late Monday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis charged former President Donald Trump and 18 other defendants in a 98-page indictment that included a total of 41 different counts.
The defendants are already fighting back, with Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, seeking to remove the case to federal court based on a statute that protects federal officials from state court prosecution for official conduct. More counteroffensives will likely follow, with other former federal officials, including Trump, presumably also seeking removal to federal court, while the remaining defendants will probably expeditiously move to dismiss the indictment on a variety of grounds.
To get a handle on the indictment and to stay current with the various developments, it is helpful to put the charges into one of six buckets, starting with the biggest one: the alleged RICO conspiracy.
Bucket 1: RICO
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) count runs some 70 pages and says all 19 defendants, “while associated with an enterprise, unlawfully conspired and endeavored to conduct and participate in, directly and indirectly, such enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity.” The indictment next defines the “enterprise” as “a group of individuals associated in fact,” who “had connections and relationships with one another” and “functioned as a continuing unit for a common purpose of achieving the objectives of the enterprise,” which Willis maintains was “to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.”
There are several problems with the RICO count, most fundamentally,
